Who are you guys and what’s this blog all about?

Hi! Our names are Ze Wei, Lydia Hammond, Daniel Saunders and Bonnie Zion. Collectively we are the Cascade Cooking Crew. We started this project as an Independent Learning Contract within our Terroir class at The Evergreen State College. We are happily doing a few things in this ILC, I will explain in greater detail below. Thanks and welcome to our blog! This is where we will be documenting our project by posting pictures, videos, sourcing information, recipes and our research about food science that you can navigate through our links above, ENJOY!

Some of the main components of our ILC include–

–Sourcing food as locally as we could. This mostly meant meats, veggies, seafood, fruit and dairy as we could find them available to us. Condiments and spices were only used to enhance these products. Some of our ingredients were directly sourced from farmers and some, though still produced locally, we found at surrounding stores. We wanted to find out how easy, or how hard, it would to make connections to local foods and what processes and trials producers go through to provide these goods. This included lots of day trips to farms, obtaining a shellfish and seaweed gathering license, foraging expeditions and networking with people in our class and community to obtain delicious local foods!

–Researching our ingredients– We added in a food science and natural history aspect to our ILC towards the end because we wanted to have some more tangible things to learn and write about. We found that some of the ingredients we were using and some of the meals we were making had very interesting histories and properties that could only enhance the final product which made it more enjoyable and interesting to consume. See our Natural history and Food science tab above for more on this.

–Designing menus for meals and cooking– We designed menus by talking about what seasonal ingredients we could find locally and what we wanted to do with them. This process was pure creativity tempered by the material constraints of budget, place, and season. We would come up with ideas for dishes we thought would be creative and taste good, dishes that might give our neighbors and friends in Western Washington inspiration into the potential range of uses our ingredients have. One good example would be our fried chicken recipe, using three local chickens from different farms to make a big batch of Southern U.S. style buttermilk fried chicken, seasoned with a southern Chinese style spice mix! Other times we tried to showcase PNW flavors to the best of our abilities, letting those flavors speak for themselves. Our inspirations came from many different places including meals we ate on an two week field trip through northern and central California, long conversations on car rides, things we could buy for good prices, and things we found and foraged. Having as a group member Ze Wei, a very talented cook with a global perspective on food and great knowledge about Chinese food especially, offered the rest of the group inspiration and new ideas. This helped us form skills in collaborating and designing. We took plenty of time to develop cooking skills through trial and error. We learned how to manage a kitchen in a more organized and methodical way, how to prepare food in a timely manner, how to serve up to about 15 guests as well as cleaning and packing up/ transporting skills.

–Media– Lastly, to make sure this is all remembered and well documented for ourselves and those interested, we learned some media skills including: How to take representative photos and videos, interviewing, video editing, audio editing and blog building. We have produced a few different videos, linked our instagram so you can view photos, and created this website that we plan to keep updated as our cooking and researching continues.

  thanks for visiting! Photos clockwise from top left: Ze Wei, Bonnie Zion, Lydia Hammond, Whisk Graffiti, Daniel Saunders (photos by Lydia and Bonnie)